It’s called the WAVE, which stands for Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience. It’s a concept truck and trailer that previews the future of long-haul freight, and it’s designed by Walmart in partnership with Peterbilt, Great Dane Trailers, and Capstone Turbine.

The cab might look like it ran over the back half of a Corvette, but that low profile shape makes it 20 percent more aerodynamic than your standard rig. It’s towing the world’s first 53-foot carbon fiber trailer, which you most certainly would not want to catch on a low bridge.

Inside, the driver sits in the middle–F1 style–and is flanked by LCD displays. But it’s not just for driving: There’s also a sleek sleeper cabin in the back.

The truck uses a turbine-powered battery-electric hybrid drivetrain, and the combustion engine can run on diesel, natural gas and biodiesel.

Curiously, there’s no mention of estimated fuel economy. But even the aerodynamic gains alone could save Walmart a massive amount of money. The company has a fleet of over 6,000 trucks, so every mile per gallon saved is monumental.

Time interview with Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre as they move into streaming music beyond their hugely successful headsets

And the younger generation had no idea what the music was supposed to sound like. That’s why both of us take great pride in the fact that this company is turning a lot of young people onto quality sound, when what they were getting before was really bad earbuds and computers where the speakers faced the table. Dre was very frustrated with that, and we talked about that quite often, because my beginning was as a recording engineer as well. So we’ve always shared that – it was our connection from day one, speakers and audio. And this came about and we did this, and we’re very proud of the fact that an entire generation now is turned onto audio.

Move over ESPN, MLB Advanced Media is piloting new player tracking technology which will bring Big Data to defensive plays

“The cameras went through a pilot test last year at Citi Field, and track the trajectory and speed of a ball, and show the path it takes. Simultaneously, they recognize where defenders are on the field, and how far they are from where the ball will land; it then tracks their actual paths, and how optimal they were. One of the examples used was a fly ball hit to left-center: Jason Heyward tracked it and caught it, running at a top speed of over 18 miles per hour, accelerating at 15.1 feet per second, and taking a path that took 83.2 feet, compared to the 80.9-foot optimal path. This is a 97 percent-efficient path, and was far faster than that of the left fielder, whose stats we also see. (Also tracked: reaction time, which is both useful and cool.) This will happen for every single ball put into play.

For now, the plan is for the cameras to be in three ballparks this year—Miller Park in Milwaukee, Target Field in Minnesota, and a second season at Citi Field—and every park in the league by 2015. Like PITCHf/x, it will be made available in near-realtime for broadcast and highlights.”

At Microsoft Convergence a couple of weeks ago, Matthew Carter, chief executive officer of Lotus Formula 1 described how Dynamics helps his team

“Where it gives us an advantage above some of the other teams is in terms of what we can analyze exactly what it's costing us to make a performance gain on the car. So we can look at maybe a change to a front wing or a change to a rear wing, and we can decide which of those is going to be the most cost-effective way of increasing the speed on the track.”

How expensive and tech savvy can Formula One teams be? Motor Trend magazine captured this photo of the Ferrari F1 telemetry team last year (7 of the 12 members shown below - 11 is Luigi Fraboni, head of Engine Track Operations)

“Gone are the V8 engines that growled at 18,000 revs per minute. They've been replaced by smaller, turbocharged V6s. Gone are the sleek airplane nose cones. Get used to stepped "anteater" noses. And you can kiss reliability goodbye; these new models could fail up to 50% of the time early in the season.

The main reasons behind the shift have to do in large part with the sport's attention to green technology. In an effort to reduce emissions and fuel consumption, teams have expanded the use of kinetic energy recovery systems (Kers), similar to those in your hybrid hatchback. There were also improvements in safety, an area of huge progress since F1's last driver fatality (Ayrton Senna in 1994).

The result is a car that is unlike anything seen in 60 years of F1. As it hits the track, we look back at a few other revolutionary designs throughout F1 history that marked the beginning of new eras in the sport.”

Technology at the UK company which has gained notoriety during the search for MH370...

“Each Global Xpress satellite costs about $400m and is the size of a London bus. The new generation can run 100 times faster than the old technology and the potential size of new markets is said to be worth $3bn a year across maritime, aviation, energy, government and commercial fields.

In aviation, where Inmarsat's broadband service is already on 5,000 planes, it could mean high-quality 3D pictures being received by passengers on planes. Business people flying across China could be able to join video conferences hosted in the US. "That's the era that's coming," says Pearce.

The new technology will also be capable of streaming critical positioning and cockpit data from aircraft in real time, reducing the urgency of finding the black box in cases like MH370. “

“This summer, the reach of facial-recognition software will grow further still. As part of its Next-Generation Identification (NGI) program, the FBI will roll out nationwide access to more than 16 million mug shots, and local and state police departments will contribute millions more. It’s the largest, most comprehensive database of its kind, and it will turn a relatively exclusive investigative tool into a broad capacity for law enforcement. Officers with no in-house face-matching software—the overwhelming majority—will be able to submit an image to the FBI’s servers in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where algorithms will return a ranked list of between 2 and 50 candidates.

The $1.2-billion NGI program already collects more than faces. Its repositories include fingerprints and palm prints; other biometric markers such as iris scans and vocal patterns may also be incorporated. “

but before you yell privacy violation consider this

“Facial recognition, on the other hand, never identifies a subject—at best, it suggests prospects for further investigation. In part, that’s because faces are mutable. Fingerprints don’t grow mustaches, and DNA can’t throw on a pair of sunglasses. But faces can sprout hair and sag with time and circumstance. People can also resemble one another, either because they have similar features or because a low-resolution image tricks the algorithm into thinking they do.”

and the Cara facial recognition Reebok uses in some of its stores (in graph) and casinos in Macau and elsewhere are using are just as sophisticated

“Beyond its Smart Home designs, Samsung has pushed appliance-specific features into each product to differentiate them from the competition. Its Chef Collection refrigerator (in video) can dispense still and sparkling water, keep different zones cooled to different temperatures, and convert a small fridge compartment into a secondary freezer. The company’s FlexDuo oven comes with an insert that can partition it into two cooking areas heated to different temperatures. At CES, Samsung executives introduced a dishwashing technology called WaterWall, which replaces the familiar rotary spray arm with a linear system that promises to get water into hard-to-reach corners of the dishwasher.”